On writing: poetry and prose

Weekly Chapter Challenge

I belong to a great group on Writers Digest Community It’s callled “Weekly Chapter Challenge.” If you sign up for the Writers Digest Community website (which is great, by the way), you can the join the group. Then you can post a request and ask for a “Chapter Buddy.” I signed up at the beginning and have been exchanging chapters of my current work in progress, a middle grade novel tentatively entitled “Don’t Ask Me Why,” for over two months now. And don’t bother asking me why I called my book that.

We exchange a chapter of each of our works — we try to send on Sunday, and the following Sunday, we send back comments on our buddie’s previous week’s chapter and send along our new one.

Thanks to my buddy, EJ Wesley (Check out his blog — The Open Vein) I’ve made terrific progress. I’m staring the second half of my book in the face at the moment — I’m not quite sure how many more chapters I’ll have, mostly because they’re not yet written.

All I can say is that EJ’s comments have been so, so helpful, and having to be accountable to someone for a new chapter every (or almost every — we’ve skipped a week here and there) week is fabulous.